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2 Responses to “Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit”

[…] Terry Pinkard has the complete copy of his new translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit available online. Check out the double-sided version (English on the left, German on the right). (Via Larval Subjects.) […]

I was trying to respond to a post you made on the old version of your blog, where you were wondering if an anti-totalitarian Hegel who recognizes that the concept is “not-all”, in light of one of Zizek’s readings, was possible. Posting here since it didn’t go up there —

Of course Richard Rorty offers no systematic account of the anti-totalitarian Hegel you’re looking for, but in effect Rorty implies this kind of Hegelianism in his work. Essentially, as I understand Hegel, Zizek, and Rorty, there remains a “real” difference between private and public, between nature and culture, between the real and the idea (the rational concept of the real), however, these differences do not imply a transcendent other or god, nor any need for a transcendent other or god. Rather, it is a matter of understanding Hegel’s famous challenge in his Preface to the Phenomenology that we need to grasp “the identity between identity and difference”. We can take this ‘higher’ identity as the one Zizek refers to in saying that it is by the concept ‘as such’, ‘in itself’ that conceptual thinking Knows (absolutely) that it is ‘not-all’. Yet, in this absolute Knowing (still recognizing a kind of Kantian limitation), we can know that any sense of identity or intelligibility that ever will or could arise will take the shape of the concept. Thus, unlike Kant, the Hegelian concept knows that any nostalgic musing over any idea of a transcendent intelligible ‘thing’ or ‘god’ stimulated by the (aesthetic) sense of otherness is just a new shape of the concept taking form.